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Tesla: 100% Market Share in Silicon Valley

Written by: Anton Wahlman02/12/13 - 9:58 AM EST

Tickers in this article:
AAPL TSLA

NEW YORK ( TheStreet) -- The plural of anecdote is statistics. There are lies, damned
lies and statistics. So take what I am about to say for whatever it
is worth. Maybe nothing. I own some Tesla(TSLA) stock, after all, just so I can go to the annual shareholder meeting, get a free coffee and be my usual pest.

You could argue that what I am about to present is the equivalent of
saying, "I've never seen a non- Apple(AAPL) tablet out in the wild, so
therefore..." -- and you would be right. But people are still
justifying this kind of reasoning as one factor to consider when
predicting the success of this or that gadget, operating system, etc.

So because this is the case in other cases, you will have to indulge
me for committing this sin in this case now. The opportunity is
simply too rich.

Tesla started delivering its all-electric Model S luxury sedan to
consumers in the middle of 2012. By all accounts it appears to have
delivered at least approximately 3,000 of them by year's end, and for
2013 the company has guided to 20,000 cars.

On the one hand, that's a whole lot of cars. On the other hand, it's
like spitting into the ocean. There are over 300 million people in
this country, and there are over 15 million cars sold per year in the
U.S. Even at 15,000 cars per year, Tesla would constitute only 0.1% of
the U.S. new car market. Obviously, an even smaller percentage of the
cumulative stock of cars on the roads.

Here's the thing, though: This is still very early days for Tesla.
It's like judging the prospects of the iPhone based on how many people
bought the iPhone on that first day in June 2007. It told us nothing
about the iPhone's success two, four or six years hence. It's hard to
believe now, but for the iPhone's first year in the market, it was not
considered to have had a meaningful quantitative impact in the market.

In the early days, a new product can sometimes take root in a very
uneven pattern, geographically speaking. The Tesla Model S is an
excellent example. There are multiple reasons for this:

1. Tesla's Year-End 'Mad Dash'

Tesla had hoped to build 5,000 cars by year's end. Over the summer and
fall of 2012, it became clear that it simply took an extra month to
pull all the parts and manufacturing processes. Therefore, to
maximize the probability of delivering at least half as many as cars
-- 2,500 -- by year-end, Tesla focused on first delivering cars to
people living as close to the factory as possible. Those would be the
people who pick up at the factory, and where delivery otherwise can
take place inside the San Francisco Bay area.

Yes, I know, Tesla still made some deliveries to other geographies,
and some people -- such as some from Los Angeles -- picked up the car
at the factory themselves. But Tesla focused on maximizing deliveries
by Dec. 31, and that meant focusing disproportionately on people
living within an hour or two away, driving-wise.